Why are big Bitcoin miners not destroying Alt coins with a 51% attack?

[Kakmakr]

So, we all know some massive Bitcoin mining operations are currently mining Bitcoin and they have loads of hashing power to mine these coins. The hashing power needed to mine Alt coins are considerably less, so if these large mining operations wanted to, they could easily switch to some of the smaller Alt coins and just execute a double spend to destroy their reputation.

I was thinking if some of these bad actors wanted to eliminate the competition, they could easily do this, but why are they not doing it?

Possible reasons :

1. Reputation - Well, here we are talking about their own reputation. People would stop selling hardware to these bad actors, if they were identified or they might lose hashing power if other people in that same Pool, move to another Pool.

2. Money - Could they ultimately lose more income, if they stop mining Bitcoin and then get less gain by doing a double spend? <51% attack>  

3. Nothing to gain? - Destroy one Alt coin and 2 will spring up in it's place?

4. Everyone lose - When the media find out that a 51% attack were succesfully executed on a Alt coin, it might give all Crypto currencies a bad reputation. < Possible investors will turn against Crypto currencies, because of the security risk? >

5. Asic proof mining - Some Alt coins have different mining algorithms that are Asic proof.

6. It is a crime - It is a criminal action to execute a double spend and to get illegal fianancial gain. <edited - added this - credit to hatshepsut93 >

I am curios to know why large mining operations are currently playing fair, when they have the hashing power to destroy most smaller Alt coins. Let's discuss the possible reason why they are not doing this.  

[gentlemand]

They don't care enough?

And as we've seen repeatedly the zombies that populate this market don't care either. As soon as whatever coin recovers from its 51% attack it's back to business as usual. And in plenty of cases it appears prices didn't dip whatsoever.

They'd also be losing money by diverting power. If something was shortable then you might do OK but as above there may be zero difference in price. It seems like a lot of work for no likely gain.

I'm not sure what a Bitcoin farm could attack other than BCH or BSV and they may prefer to keep those alive as an option for future short term profit. What other SHA 256 coins are there worth paying attention to? TheresaMayCoin doesn't have a bright future.

They may also have plenty of investors who'd frown on that. That's what blew my mind about Bitmain. Presumably they had no oversight because if I had put large amounts of money into them their Bcash adventure would've had me suing their arses off.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I think it's largely profit driven. 51% attacking a minor altcoin would be less profitable than just continuing to honestly mine BTC. Sure, they could fill their bags, dump them for BTC, reverse their transactions, and get their bags back, but to do so with a large enough volume to even approach how much they would make just honestly mining BTC would wreck the order books for that coin and dump the price significantly.

I don't there is any need to "destroy the reputation" of coins like BCH or BSV. Their delusions leaders and insecure chains are quite capable of doing that for themselves.

And as we've seen repeatedly the zombies that populate this market don't care either. As soon as whatever coin recovers from its 51% attack it's back to business as usual. And in plenty of cases it appears prices didn't dip whatsoever.

It's sad, but it's true. BCH was successfully 51% attacked by a couple of their big miners a few months ago, who decided they didn't like some transaction that had taken place and they were going to reverse them. What did all the BCH shills do at the sudden realization that their coin was no longer decentralized, immutable, or censorship resistant? Literally nothing. Continued worshiping Ver and bleating on about being "the real bitcoin".

[Kakmakr]

I think it's largely profit driven. 51% attacking a minor altcoin would be less profitable than just continuing to honestly mine BTC. Sure, they could fill their bags, dump them for BTC, reverse their transactions, and get their bags back, but to do so with a large enough volume to even approach how much they would make just honestly mining BTC would wreck the order books for that coin and dump the price significantly.

I don't there is any need to "destroy the reputation" of coins like BCH or BSV. Their delusions leaders and insecure chains are quite capable of doing that for themselves.

And as we've seen repeatedly the zombies that populate this market don't care either. As soon as whatever coin recovers from its 51% attack it's back to business as usual. And in plenty of cases it appears prices didn't dip whatsoever.

It's sad, but it's true. BCH was successfully 51% attacked by a couple of their big miners a few months ago, who decided they didn't like some transaction that had taken place and they were going to reverse them. What did all the BCH shills do at the sudden realization that their coin was no longer decentralized, immutable, or censorship resistant? Literally nothing. Continued worshiping Ver and bleating on about being "the real bitcoin".

Agreed, but the BTC vs BCH thing was a bit different, because these die hard shills just continued doing their masters work like slaves and they kept on dumping fiat into a failed experiment to safe face.    The BCH reputation did not take a massive hit, because they under played the seriousness of the situation by spreading more FUD. <A lot of speculators does not understand the repercussions of a 51% attack, because they are too focussed on profits.>

It might be something totally different, when smaller Alt coins are targeted with a lot less support. You systematically take down one by one, until the public realize how vulnerable and insecure they are.    < I am not telling people to do this, but it might be a perfect attack vector >

[fiulpro]

Why would they do that. ?
Why would you destroy something that is actually beneficial for your main coin , actually the more coins that are in the market , the more choices people have and better will the coins become individually , therefore I think that this is something that is good for us.
Libra only increased the value of bitcoins , people started recognising it more .
It's called healthy competition.

[Kakmakr]

Why would they do that. ?
Why would you destroy something that is actually beneficial for your main coin , actually the more coins that are in the market , the more choices people have and better will the coins become individually , therefore I think that this is something that is good for us.
Libra only increased the value of bitcoins , people started recognising it more .
It's called healthy competition.

Well, why do people destroy their competition? Big retailers buy out their competition to get a bigger market share and these large Bitcoin miners might try to eliminate the competition to have less investment into shitty Alt coins and more investment into Bitcoin <BTC>

Just imagine what the Bitcoin price would be, if all money invested into 1000s of Alt coins was rather invested into Bitcoin. <BTC>  

I am not saying that it would work and that most of those investors would re-invest in BTC, once Bitcoin miners destroyed their investment in Alt coins, but some miners might have that logic and they might just be tempted to do that.  

[dothebeats]

Waste of time, resources and money. There is little to no practicality into a 51% attack involving coins that you don't mess around with, or you don't have substantial control to anyway so why would anyone do that? Instead of using that time and resources to mine things which they would get nothing from, why not use those instead to mine something they'd take profit on? The logic is simply there, and even if some nitwit really does this, 51% attack in the long run is costly and is certain to destroy the value of the coin so there's really nothing to gain from it apart from notoriety and bragging rights (?).

[hatshepsut93]

Because 51% attack is a crime, it is used to steal money from people by reversing transactions, and to be successful and profitable you need to invest a huge amount of hashpower into it, so the crime will be pretty big - we're talking about millions in USD. Obviously authorities will investigate it, and the list of suspects will be very short - they'll just go after the biggest miners until they will find the perpetrators.

There are 51% attacks that are not considered a crime, like mining empty blocks or censoring transactions, but those aren't profitable.

[Steamtyme]

This is the best answer below. I don't put it past any large entity in mining to have a moral compass that would turn away the opportunity to stomp out competition. In this case there isn't any competition really, and who knows how many of these potential bad actors are still holding onto their forked, BCH. That's like burning a wallet full of foreign currency because you hate the country.

As it stands there are enough farms out there to easily screw with the BCH network at last check they sit under 2 EH for the entire network. Asics make it so you can't just bounce around different Algo's. Your topic is exactly why no one will launch a brand new Sha-256 coin, the network would not be secure and you couldn't grow the project. If you look into alt coins it becomes a bit more tricky as there is no shortage of GPU's out there and the market is significantly more cutthroat as people chase profits. It doesn't matter what your project is it's probably forked and renamed within a week if it has legs and that's when competition starts looking at how to harm the competitor.

I'm not sure what a Bitcoin farm could attack other than BCH or BSV and they may prefer to keep those alive as an option for future short term profit. What other SHA 256 coins are there worth paying attention to? TheresaMayCoin doesn't have a bright future.

[1Referee]

Aside from all aforementioned reasons, it's also pretty pointless to attack BCash with how Bitmain & Co will temporarily take off a part of their hashpower that's pointed to BTC, and point it to BCash to protect their chain. Bitmain & Co have already shown that they are ready to take off hashpower from BTC and they won't hesitate to do it again.

There is not enough incentive for you as an attacker to keep attacking that chain, while you face miners with billions worth of incentive to keep protecting it.

I like the fact that the majority of the Bitcoin miners are focused on conducting fair business. They don't have to resort to frauds and illegal acts to make money. They are on the side of the goose that lays the Golden eggs already.

[gentlemand]

Just imagine what the Bitcoin price would be, if all money invested into 1000s of Alt coins was rather invested into Bitcoin. <BTC>  

In most cases you need to buy BTC to get into your shitcoin and everyone, apart from maniacs, is in shitcoins to make more BTC or dollars. They're effectively an extension of the Bitcoin economy and a significant one. A high proportion of miner fees will be related to moving in and out of exchanges to play alts.

[TimeBits]

pretty simple, they would lose money. But if it was a miner pool/group/really rich FED leader that did not care about profits, they could, they could destroy bitcoin as they have unlimited money to buy unlimited asics.

[gentlemand]

pretty simple, they would lose money. But if it was a miner pool/group/really rich FED leader that did not care about money, they could, they could destroy bitcoin as they have unlimited money to buy unlimited asics.

There are over 2 million machines mining. They don't appear out of thin air. Where would anyone obtain over 1 million machines? By the time you'd gathered enough the difficulty would be that much higher you'd have to go and find a million more.

It's not impossible. It would be very, very, very hard.

[TimeBits]

pretty simple, they would lose money. But if it was a miner pool/group/really rich FED leader that did not care about money, they could, they could destroy bitcoin.

...No, we are not talking about BITCOIN having a double spend attack and the only way that would ever be a possibility is if they kept the machines off, hoarded them in a warehouse and did it all enough before others keep expanding and then turn on all at once. If they were already on and slowly ramping up measures would be taken to switch to other pools, if it was a private pool it would have to be a HELL of a lot of hashrate.

 They have unlimited money to buy unlimited asics. They can even buy entire mining ops already in progress.

Not to sure what is hard about printing a few more trillion out of thin air. They do it daily! literally 1 click of a button to create $12789638712674861786487126478967127890476102876408712789123 money to buy all the fucking asics or create more.

It's not impossible. It would be very, very, very hard.

[Steamtyme]

They have unlimited money to buy unlimited asics.[/b] They can even buy entire mining ops already in progress.

No the Asics are limited. Try and order a new one right now, you can get a few at a very large mark-up or you can wait a few months. Assuming you could buy 1 000 000 of them right now, that's another 2 million they are going to build, 3 months from now.
Sure they could go around and buy up every old piece of hardware someone is willing to part with. That someone may not want to because they can still earn a little or want to mine, who knows. Same argument goes for the farms that they could buy. Unless those farms are losing money why would the owners want out? Most of these large players have positioned themselves with their farms from either early adoption or investing large amounts of capital to begin with.

Not to sure what is hard about printing a few more trillion out of thin air. They do it daily! literally 1 click of a button to create $12789638712674861786487126478967127890476102876408712789123 money to buy all the fucking asics or create more.

It would be an interesting feat to print that cash, then get it into the hands of these manufacturers, all before it crashes whatever price it was holding when the idea seemed like a good one.

[eaLiTy]

2. Money - Could they ultimately lose more income, if they stop mining Bitcoin and then get less gain by doing a double spend? <51% attack>  
3. Nothing to gain? - Destroy one Alt coin and 2 will spring up in it's place?

Economics is everything when it comes to huge mining corporations, there is nothing to gain when they are destroying the alt coins but if they decide to do that the amount of power and energy they are spending just to destroy something without any return is a fool's errand and no one in their right sense will do anything of that capacity until they have an agenda to destroy a particular alt coin.

4. Everyone lose - When the media find out that a 51% attack were succesfully executed on a Alt coin, it might give all Crypto currencies a bad reputation. < Possible investors will turn against Crypto currencies, because of the security risk? >

If someone really decides to attack a certain alt coin, do you really think that they will think about the implications what the media will bring to the coin, it is not a new thing that coins die off and even ETH had a rollback without any consensus, if an alt coin dies no one cares unless it is a top level coin in the market list.

I am curios to know why large mining operations are currently playing fair, when they have the hashing power to destroy most smaller Alt coins. Let's discuss the possible reason why they are not doing this.  

As mentioned above, it is all about financial gains as they have invested heavily into mining and time is of the essence as the mining reward goes down with time and the competition is really high in the mining sector and there is no point in spending their electricity to destroy something is the simple reason large mining operators are not doing anything stupid.

[Vishnu.Reang]

Because it is not the right thing to do. Neither ethical, nor effective. In case you destroy a coin with a 51% attack, then a lot of unwanted sympathy will be generated for that coin and Bitcoin supporters will attract a lot of criticism. It is a free world, let all the coins fight for their share in the market. If some scam coin is there, it will automatically die out.

[serjent05]

Another thing is several altcoin have different algorithm than Bitcoin.  That is one of the reason one Bitcoin miners cannot perform 51% attack to several altcoins.  We all know that Bitcoin is sha256d algo while others have scrypt, x11, etc..  Doing a 51% attack to this altcoin means that they have to spend huge fund to attack the network of different algo blockchain. 

[Artemis3]

I don't think its profitable to destroy/seize their blockchain, similar to bitcoin you need to invest mining equipment to pull that out, and the net gains are probably inferior to the value of that coin. The same mining equipment would have produced more money mining instead.

Of course do know that by the time you pull the attack successfully, the market value of that coin plummets. Some altcoins have suffered it and gone into oblivion. Yes in theory the smaller coins need lesser resources, but its still resources that could be producing wealth elsewhere rather than destroying a coin.

[BitHodler]

And as we've seen repeatedly the zombies that populate this market don't care either. As soon as whatever coin recovers from its 51% attack it's back to business as usual. And in plenty of cases it appears prices didn't dip whatsoever.

It blew my mind when I saw that BTG didn't even react aside from its own regular fluctuations.

If I held any BTG after finding out about its 51% attack, I directly would have dumped all my coins hard to never look back again, which would make me the fool instead of those who kept holding on to their coins.

I'm really glad to not own any shitcoin. My holdings currently consist of 95% BTC and 5% ETH and that's more than enough. Both coins are the most secure POW networks within their own segment. Nothing else is needed.